Richard Dansky

Most of my best writing teachers have been books.

Since graduating high school, I have taken precisely one formal full-length writing course. It was entitled “Writing For the Stage”, an undergraduate seminar at Wesleyan taught by an irascible Mancunian poet named Tony Connor. I learned a great many things from Professor Connor, not the least of which was what it sounds like when you try to get Harold Pinter out to the pub for a pint. What I didn’t learn in this, the last extended writing instruction I’d ever receive, was much about the writing of prose. (Drama, yes. Prose, no. And the less said about the discussion in English 201 about “Alien Death Fleet”, the better.)

What that meant, ultimately, that most of what I learned about writing came from other teachers, ones who didn’t dwell in classrooms. It came from editors like Ed Hall at White Wolf, who was the first one to make me think about word choice as it related to character motivation. It came from writers like Storytellers’ own Janet Berliner and Jim Moore, who took me under their respective wings, poked and prodded at the writing I showed them, and lovingly eviscerated my work in a way that helped make it – and me – better.

But mostly, it came from books. It came from reading endlessly and finding things on the page that I could learn from, that I wanted to achieve and knew that I couldn’t, at least not yet. It came from finding authors who were no-doubt-about-it better than I was and reading them twice; once for pleasure, and once to dissect what they did in hopes of getting a glimmer of how they did it.

Then I’d try it, and fail, and try again. Mind you, I suspect that in most cases, I’m failing still. Now, though, I know enough to try, and that means a great deal.

And so, on this Thanksgiving, here’s a list of ten authors whose work I am thankful for, for they have been my teachers. They are not the only writers I have learned from or enjoyed or admired; indeed, far from it. But they are, however, the ones whose writing set off singular lightning bolts of what I devoutly hope is understanding, and for that, I can only express my appreciation.

• Charles L. Grant, whose descriptions could only be called impressionistic, and who could gracefully paint a scene in a handful of words without losing a single detail.
• John Myers Myers, whose Silverlock serves as a constant reminder of the joy of telling stories, and how those stories can resonate and mingle.
• Julian May, whose juggling of immense dramatis personae provided the key to infusing even minor characters with distinct personalities and memorable roles.
• H.P. Lovecraft, for demonstrating the art of describing without description, the definition of what something is not being much more effective than a clinical recitation of what something is.
• Raymond Chandler, whose Simple Art of Murder is a masterclass of calling bullshit on all the writerly tricks that are so tempting to use and abuse.
• Thomas Ligotti, whose phrasing drove me to commit attempted euphony, and with malice aforethought.
• Manly Wade Wellman, for providing an object lesson on how regional dialect and color can be much more than mere window dressing – and harsh reminders on the importance of getting it right.
• T.E.D. Klein, for inducting me, all unknowing, into the cult of the well-meaning nebbish protagonist. I remain a faithful devotee to this day.
• Tim Powers, whose lesson to me was that you don’t have to make it all up, not when the real world has already provided such astonishingly rich source material. Obvious in hindsight, yes, but earth-shattering to someone raised on the graph-paper-and-funny-name school of epic fantasy novels the size of cinderblocks.
• Stephen King, for the constant reminder that in amidst the blood and thunder, what actually matters in a horror novel is not the monster, nor the gore, nor the hypothetical special effects budget, but instead the people.

For all these, and for many others, I am thankful. But most of all, I am thankful that class is still in session and always will be; that there are still authors out there to be discovered whose works I can learn from, and new works from authors I know that I have not yet explored.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some homework to do. And yes, I’m looking forward to it.

There are a lot of lakes and ponds in the Triangle, many of them man-made. There’s one I pass driving to work every day, and another that sits across the street from my office. You can go there on your lunch break and see people fishing or sailing or throwing frisbees into the water for their dogs to chase. I’ve even availed myself of the facilities a few times, and am pleased to report I’ve only fallen out of a rented canoe once, and briefly.

An admittedly unscientific sample suggests that most of those folks have no idea that Lake Crabtree (and the “lake” part is purely an honorific; it’s about as deep as a Bret Michaels interview and covers only slightly more territory) was dug out with backhoes and bulldozers in the not-too-distant past. Even the signs posted at various semi-prominent points don’t get the point across. Maybe they’re ugly signs. Maybe people have come up with their own stories about where the lake came from and how long it’s been around, and if things are otherwise, they don’t want to know. Either way, it works for them.

Which, I suppose, is the point of the story.

Enjoy.

***

THE DEEP END OF THE SHALLOW WATER

We got out of the car just before sunset, a half-mile down a gravel service road that we shouldn’t have been able to access. The spot where we’d stopped was a pretty one, a clearing in the second-growth pine woods that ran up the edge of the body of water we’d come to investigate. Soft dirt gave way to sticky clay down by the shoreline, and tree roots and tufts of grasses marked the bank all the way down. I could see reeds poking up through the water, stands of them here and there in places where the bottom was muddy enough to support plant life that ambitious. Across the way I could see the other side, red dirt and green grass underneath a purpling sky. It didn’t look terribly far away.

“What do you think?” Lester said, and grinned. His boots crunched on the white rock of the road as he moseyed around to the trunk, the better to pop it and get out the equipment. “Is this spot perfect or what?”

I stared at him for a minute, then pointed at the water. “Lester,” I said, “That is a pond.”

He nodded. “So it is, Tyler, so it is.” The trunk squealed open and his head disappeared inside as he began rummaging around.

“Let me try this again,” I said, and took a couple of steps closer to the water. “Lester, this is a pond. Moreover, if I am reading that sign there correctly” – I pointed to an innocuous piece of metal that proclaimed the pond to be “Flood Control Structure #32″ – “it’s a man-made pond. Constructed, I might add, in 1966.”

His head popped out for a moment, now adorned with night-vision goggles. “Is it, now?”

I took a deep breath, counted to ten, and let it go slowly. No sense letting Lester drive me crazy this early in the evening, I thought. He’d have all night to do it, if I let him.

“Lester,” I said in my most reasonable voice, “stop that. What we are looking at is an artificial pond so small I could swim it without kicking my shoes off first. Hell, it’s so shallow I could probably walk it, and never have to hold my breath. If there are any fish in there, they were artificially introduced when this thing was built. There is maybe enough biomass in that whole thing to support one moderately anorexic snapping turtle as the local apex predator, and that’s it.”

“Really.” He sounded distracted, or at least he did until he straightened up too fast and bounced the back of his head off the inside of the trunk lid. “Owww.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” I stomped over to the car and relieved Lester of half the armload of equipment he was carrying. It was all there, the usual gear for this sort of trip: NVG, infrared cameras, motion sensors, microphones, and more. There was also a sealed thermos marked “rotten fish” in Lester’s wife’s handwriting, more proof that she was the most patient and sainted of women to walk this earth, and what looked like 250 feet of 50 pound test line with no other fishing equipment in sight. “You all right?”

“Yes, yes, fine. Just…put that down over there.” He waved vaguely toward the water. “Ow.”

“Don’t think self-mutilation’s going to get you out of answering me,” I told him, even as I did what he said. “You still haven’t told me why the hell you think we’re going to find something here.”

“Because it’s there,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world, and slammed the trunk with casual malice. “That’s the reason we go everywhere, right?”

I shook my head. “Lester, we go where there are genuine, verifiable sightings of cryptozoological specimens, not hysterical impossibilities.”

He joined me at the top of the bank and deposited his load of gear next to mine. “You’re absolutely correct, and again, that’s why we’re here. Give me a hand down?” Without waiting for me to answer, he slid down the muddy slope. His heels gouged long, smooth lines in the clay as he went.

I waited for him to find his footing, then started handing pieces of gear to him. “Les, we did not have a genuine, verifiable sighting here. We had a couple of drunk teenagers with a cell phone camera.”

“And the images they recorded clearly show something in the water. Which is why we’re here.”

“For God’s sake, Lester, where’s the breeding population going to come from? Old packets of sea monkeys?”

He shook his head, and brushed his hands on the well-worn fishing vest he always wore on trips like these. “You’re missing the point, my friend. Come on down here and I’ll try to show you.”

“Show me what?” I grumbled suspiciously, but by then I was already moving. “Another cell phone video?”

“No, not quite.” My heels hit ground and I skidded backwards. Only Lester’s hand caught me, stabilizing me from going over while I lurched to my feet. He said nothing until I was upright and steady, then gestured toward the far shore. “Now, look out there. What do you see?”

I peered out into the gathering dusk. Overhead, the sky had settled to a shade of deep-bruise purple, warning us that we were running out of light. The water’s surface was still, an indigo mirror reflecting featureless heavens. Across the way, a single heron picked its fastidious way along the shoreline, pausing every so often to stab at something small and unseen. Frogs, maybe, or minnows.

“I see a pond,” I said.

Lester shook his head. “No, you don’t. You know there’s a pond here, a crappy little hole in the ground they poured some water into, so that’s all you’ll let yourself think there can be. But what do you see?”

“Lester-” I started, but he shushed me.

“You see a flood control structure. Those kids? They saw a pond that’s been here all their lives, dark and scary and with something they’ve never seen the bottom of. Maybe their older brothers told them that it had a monster in it, and they believed.”

“Then they’re idiots,” I muttered, but Lester was rolling now.

“How deep is that water? What moves underneath it? What might have been buried, asleep in the muck for centuries before the return of the waters awakened it? From here, we don’t know; they certainly don’t, or they do, and their answers have nothing to do with what the engineers might say. Us? We can’t know. All we see is that-” he waved out at the smooth surface of the pond before us – “and that reflects all our thoughts back at us. It’s impenetrable, and beyond it lies whatever we can imagine living in those murky depths. Why shouldn’t there be monsters here, if those kids want there to be some?”

“Because there can’t be,” I said weakly. “Because there’s no room, and no food, and no history. There’s a million reasons there can’t be anything bigger than a catfish in there.”

“Ah, but there can, if we want it to be there badly enough. That’s the thing about monsters, you know. They come when they’re called. When they’re possible. When they’re told that they’ve always been there.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that he was crazy, that we’d agreed to do scientific investigation only, that I was done with this partnership if he was going to sprinkle magical pixie dust over everything I’d thought we’d stood for.

And from across the water, there was a splash. I looked up, just as Lester did, just in time to see the heron disappearing in a spray of black water. Its wings beat frantically against the water’s surface for an instant and then it was gone. A handful of feathers floated into view, bright against the dark outline of a vast shape moving slowly to deeper water.

For a moment, neither of us said anything. Lester looked at me. I looked at the ground.

“Did you…see something,” I heard myself asking.

Lester sounded noncommittal. “I might have.”

“Right.” I kicked a pebble toward the water. It hit with an audible thunk, then sank out of sight, instantly. “Why don’t I go set up the equipment?”

“Why don’t I help you?”

I shook my head. “Why don’t you keep an eye on the water?”

One of the consistent excuses given for the quality (or lack thereof) of videogame writing is that we are, and I quote, “a young industry”. While it’s a lovely and convenient excuse for the endless parade of stubble-jawed ex-space marines out for interstellar vengeance that haunt the shelves, it’s hogwash. I know. I write the bloody things for a living[1], and that means playing them – good and bad – as they come along, to see how high the professional bar has been raised[2].

For one thing, there’s plenty of good writing out there, and there has been for years. Doubt me? Go back to the classic Infocom adventure games like Planetfall or Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, twenty-five plus years ago. Check out the King’s Quest adventure game series, or decade-old gems like System Shock or Tim Shafer’s Grim Fandango. Then follow the lineage to today’s titles, games like BioShock or Mass Effect. There’s good writing out there in games, in every genre. What’s more, there always has been.

That’s not to say all of the writing in games is good. Indeed, far from it. Some of it comes from bad writers, some of it comes from competent or even good writers who haven’t wrapped their heads around the unique demands of video games, and some of it even comes from marketing insisting that a focus group in Tuscaloosa has convinced them that the hero of your epic fantasy game needs to be a hard-bitten, stubble-chinned space marine. I’ll be the first one to call out bad game writing when the situation calls for it, because to pretend it isn’t there is to avoid doing what’s needed to rectify the problem. But there’s a bigger issue that depresses the overall quality of game writing, one that I’ll get to in a bit.

And before we dismiss all game writing as bad, it’s worth looking at this in perspective. Are there badly written games? Of course there are. Then again, there are also badly written books, and lots of them. Surely you, Gentle Reader, have read one or two in your time[3]. That certainly doesn’t mean all books are bad, though, just as the presence of the infamous Zero Wing[4] means all video game writing is irredeemable.  But the possibility and the proof of good writing is there, in games as it is in books, and each title deserves to be judged on its own merits.

What people are really getting at when they say “we’re a young industry” is that we are, in fact, an immature industry. That, more than anything, has been damaging to the quality of writing in games, because we’re still figuring out how to do writing in games. Not the words, but rather the process is the question.

Part of the issue is technology. A book is a book is a book – cover, spine, pages – and apart from the invention of the pop-up, the core technology really hasn’t changed much since Gutenberg. We know how to write a book, we know how to put a book together, and we know how to get a book out there. It has, after all, been done before, and the methods for doing so are time-tested and proven.

Video games, on the other hand, change, and change constantly. The technology that comprises them doesn’t stand still, and I’m not just talking consoles here. Successive titles, even on a single, stable platform, will show remarkable technical improvement as the developers learn the ins and outs of the box, and put that knowledge to good use. And use it they do, with consequences for everyone, even game writers.

Doubt me? Then think about this. When you get a better set of facial animations for the characters in your game, the list of things you can do with characters suddenly changes – and so does the necessary writing to go with it, because now you can write sequences focusing on people’s faces when before you couldn’t. Get enough storage space on your disc media to support a fully fleshed out branching campaign, and that’s more and different writing. Able to put more characters onscreen? That’s more and different writing, too, and so it goes from development cycle to development cycle. And because the technology is advancing during the development cycle, the plan for the writing can change from the beginning of the cycle to the middle to the end.

The bigger part of the problem, though, is process, or the lack thereof. While the video game industry is nearly forty years old, in that time we’ve reinvented the way we do games time and time again. We’ve gone from “one guy in his garage” to multi-hundred person teams spread out across multiple continents and reinventing agile development techniques on the fly, but with very few exceptions, we still haven’t figured out where the writing goes in the schedule, and how to give it the love it needs.

Video game development is, in large part a cascading chain of dependencies, which is a nice way of saying that in many cases that the other guy’s got to get done with his stuff before you can take a swing at it. You can’t write the dialogue for level 14 until level 14′s been at least designed, and in many cases built. And you can’t tell if the dialogue you’ve written for level 14 actually works unless you record a version of it, drop it in the game, play it through and see how it plays as part of the larger experience.[5]

In a perfect world with perfect process, this happens, and then the writer has time to do rewrites, re-records, and re-tests, working on things iteratively until it’s as good as it can be (budget and schedule permitting). That’s how we do other game elements, after all. We build levels iteratively, with multiple passes and polish phases and critique sessions. We test gameplay iteratively as well – is that jump too long? Are there too many guys in this encounter? Can we add an objective because it’s over too fast? – much to gameplay’s benefit. We do the same for characters and sound passes, we build them and test them and polish them until we get them right, and we know how to do that.

With the writing, not so much. Because writing is so heavily dependent on other aspects of the game to get nailed down, it’s often not nailed down until very late in the project, when there’s precious little time for iteration. Because voice recording (not to mention studio time and post-production) is so expensive, it’s often not an option to keep going back to the well to re-record as desired. And because game writing is still finding its feet as a game discipline, there isn’t necessarily someone at the higher levels of the project – or of the company – who can fight for the time that the writing needs to get that polish that brings it up to the level of the other elements of the game. So we don’t quite have the proper safeguards and steps in place to give writing the time and institutional support it needs to have a chance to get done right more consistently.

It’s getting better, of course. More and more companies are realizing that good writing helps them make good games. In their own ways, they’re trying to find ways to make that good writing happen, which means finding time in their development cycles for the writing to occur. Some of the steps are slow, some are in the wrong direction, and some are quite frankly, backwards. But they’re steps, and we’re taking them.

Because we’re not young, not any more. We’re just a late bloomer.

---

[1] And before you ask, no, I’m not referencing anything in particular, or anything I’ve specifically worked on here. Furthermore, I have never written a game featuring a hard-bitten ex-space marine.

[2] Or, on occasion, lowered.

[3] Or three, or four, or a half-dozen during a particularly heinous vacation to Disneyworld when it rained all weekend and all the hotel gift shop had available was a stack of murder mysteries about a winsome spinster who solved bake-sale poisonings with the aid of her suspiciously intelligent ginger cat, who is named Basil. Not that this ever happened to me, of course

[4] Of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” fame. If you don’t know what I’m talking about here, then this probably isn’t the essay for you. Check back tomorrow.

[5] Side note: There are a million ways for game writing to go bad above and beyond the quality of the writing itself. Sound design, voice acting, timing of lines, timing of action sequences – all of these and more can affect how the writing comes across in the actual game in ways the writer can’t control or affect

I’ve talked about writing reviews before in this space, but, upon further (ahem) review, I realized that my work in that regard was not quite finished. Sure, I’d talked about what I thought was important in a review, and John B. Rosenman had posted an excellent essay about his reviewing techniques, but I realized I’d left out the most important thing.

I’d forgotten to talk about how to write a bad review. Not an unfavorable one, mind you – a bad one. A book review that completely and utterly fails to do the most basic job of a book review, which is to talk about whether or not the book is worth your (the reader’s) while.

Now I’m not talking about critique here. That’s a whole other kettle of fish, and not at all what I’m interested in here. Bad critique, I’ve found, often has the twin drawbacks of being simultaneously boring and incomprehensible, and thus is rarely read by anyone not in the critic’s or author’s immediate families.

But reviews, well, those are out there – especially the bad ones. And so, in the interests of saving future bad reviewers everywhere the effort of re-re-re-inventing the twin-belted radial tire, I humbly present what, in my opinion, are the keys to getting it done.

(Not that I’ve ever done any of these. Nope. Never.)

1-Make sure the review is all about you.

Focus on any connection you might have to the work, no matter how slight. Discuss where you were when you read it, as well as how you felt, what you were wearing, what Arcade Fire song you were listening to at the time, and which particular mutant subset of “coffee” you were drinking as you skipped to the end and read the last chapter. After all, a book review should not be about the book. It should be about the reviewer.

2-Expound extensively on what you would have done if you’d written the book instead

This is key. What the author did is really just a starting point for people who are much, much smarter – say, reviewers, or slash fanfic writers eager to insert Jean-Luc Picard into any situation imaginable – to show what the book should have been. It’s particularly important to get this out there in a review, because odds are the review’s going to be the first thing someone reads about the book, and you get to stake your claim to it before anyone else.

3-Be clever. Be really, really clever.

Everyone knows the real reason to write book reviews is to get one of your lines quoted and used on a dust jacket. So, dig deep and find your wittiest witticisms. Torture your syntax. Bring your most obscure metaphors out of cryogenic storage and gene-splice them to obscure references worthy of peak-period Dennis Miller. And above all, make sure that you drop as many as you can into one-sentence paragraphs, so they can stand out.

Like this.

Or this.

Shorter and sweeter than a sample-size mandarin orange crème brulee made by angels in the pastry kitchen of heaven.

You get the idea.

4-Dogpile on the rabbit

If you don’t like a book, don’t bother with analysis as to why you don’t feel it’s worthwhile. Certainly don’t take the time to explore what might be positive in the book, or what other readers might enjoy. Accentuating the positive, and what might be worthwhile in future works from the author is a mug’s game. Get out your junior-grade Wolverine strap-on claws and start ripping. The wordier and more verbose you are, the better. The more savage and cutting your slams, the more likely you are to get quoted on message boards, and to have your cleverness reaffirmed by the patrons thereof.

This is particularly important if someone else has slammed the book, or if someone you don’t like has praised it. The former starts the always-popular game of “Who can get in the nastiest one-liner”, while the latter demonstrates your superior taste in a way that taking your toys and going home can no longer quite accomplish.

5-Let the concept take you higher

Writing a precise yet detailed description of what a book is like can be hard work, often requiring multiple attempts. Instead, it’s a lot easier to describe it as “X meets Y”. If you’re feeling particularly energetic, you can go as far as to say “X meets Y in Z”, where Z is the setting from a third property you’ve read recently. It doesn’t really matter if the signifiers you’ve picked to establish your high concept are appropriate or not. What matters is that they’re popular, and that they’re a sufficiently incongruous that mixing the two engages the review-reader’s curiosity. So, for example, you can call Tim Powers’ Last Call “The Golden Bough meets Season 2 of C.S.I.”, which is about as appropriate as calling Jaws a movie about summer in Long Island, and produce a sufficiently unique mental image to consider your job well done.

The key, of course, is adding these references without providing a single bit of supporting evidence as to why they might appropriate. It’s far better to leave them dangling out there like anglerfish lures for the unwary, and besides, supporting evidence can mess up your sentence flow.

6-Cliches for the win!

Certain phrases, in addition to saving you valuable thinking time, are guaranteed winners. These include:

• “On steroids”
• “On acid”
• “Goes up to eleven”
• “The new Stephen King”
• “Like a video game”

If you can combine more than one in a phrase such as “like a video game on steroids, with elements that go up to eleven”, you get bonus points. And possibly a souvenir t-shirt.

7-Review something besides what you’re reviewing

Let’s face it, you don’t always get to review what you want. You may be jonesing for the chance to unleash your critical eye on the latest Stephanie Meyer or Lewis Shiner, but instead, what lands in your lap might be Book 6 of the Hootenanniad, an epic fantasy of basketball-playing elves waging eternal war against the restless evil of orcish tax accountants. Despair not, however – there’s a way out. All that it takes is a link, no matter how tenuous, from the book you are reviewing to the one you want to review, and presto, you’re on preferred ground.

It’s simple, really. Pick a transition like, “Contrast this to how this author I like much better did it in this book I like much better”, and you’re off and running. Or, there’s always, “this character brings to mind comparisons with this other character I like more, who has all these really cool attributes”, and away you go.

8-Write incredibly flattering reviews of anthologies by editors whose future anthologies you want to get invited into.

Because they never, ever, ever notice when you do that.

9-Facts are for wimps, and grammar is for commies

I’m sure there are places out there where facts matter, but book reviews aren’t one of them. Or any of them. Or some of them.

Feel free to plow straight through to your point without bothering to check whether you’ve gotten minor details right, like, say, character names, the title of the book, or what actually happens along the way. If someone’s reading the review, they know what you’re talking about anyway.

The same goes for grammar. You’re telling someone about a book here, damnit, and what’s important is that you get across your feelings. If the rules of syntax and grammar can’t contain the gushing wells of literary passion that this particular read has inspired in you, then the hell with them! Publish, or at least blog, and be damned!

10-Write long

After all, a review that isn’t a significant fraction of the length of the book itself can’t possibly give you an in-depth analysis of what’s going on there. The purpose of a review isn’t to discuss whether something’s good or bad, or worth the reader’s time. It’s to provide a detailed version of “and then this happened.” Think of it as liveblogging Jane Eyre, and you’re on the right track.

11-It’s not a spoiler, it’s a scoop

You have a responsibility to your readers to protect them from any surprises that the book might offer. That’s why you regard it as your duty to unleash and any all major spoilers the book might contain in the first paragraph of your review, the better to cushion readers against the shock that comes later. Dumbledore dies? The cute boy is really a vampire? Drizz’t Do’Urden is actually the grandson of Oberon of Amber? That’s the sort of news that people can’t wait for! By getting that information out there, you’re doing your readers a service, and they will love you for it.

And so will the authors.

12-Leave ‘em guessing

Do that, and they’ll come back for more, or a least that’s the theory. It’s not important to actually let the reader know what you thought about the book. It’s not even important to state whether or not you think it’s worth reading. All of that brings your writing back down to a merely commercial level, and besides, it pins you down. It’s far better to offer random bits of observation without wrapping them in the straightjacket of an actual opinion.

Then again, it might not be.

The most important lesson I learned while working in a bookstore was taught to me by smut-loving nuns. In so many words, they taught me that people enjoy reading what they enjoy, and that trying to “elevate” them to your particular taste was a foolhardy and condescending endeavor.

The second most important lesson I learned had to do with betting against a sure thing, particularly where a waiter at a downtown bar and a lovely undergrad majoring in massage therapy are involved, but that’s another story.

The third most important lesson, though, is one that is pertinent to being a writer, and is in several senses a corollary to Lesson #1. Specifically, it’s the idea that it’s a lot easier to get people to expand their reading habits one step at a time than it is to change them, and that people are in fact genuinely interested in having someone else give them a reason to read a book.

Sound strange? It seemed strange to me, too, until I realized that the first part of that could be summed as “if you like X, then you’ll like Y”. Amazon.com, among others, use this to great effect, but it’s most important at the personal, and thus interpersonal level. After all, Amazon’s approach is an algorithm spit out of a faceless supercomputer buried somewhere beneath the Martian North Pole and guarded by an army of zombie space wombats[1], while a recommendation from a bookstore clerk comes from someone you theoretically stand a chance of having at least a conversational relationship with.

In practical terms, what this meant for me back in the day was waiting for my regular customers to plow through all of a particular author they liked, and then recommending someone else in a similar vein. If they were Stephen King readers who’d at long last come to the end of our immense King collection, I suggested Brian Lumley or Dan Simmons (and I’d specifically recommend Simmons’ Summer of Night, which in my humble opinion is about as King-like a book as one might find in his oeuvre). Why? Because it was a relatively safe bet to extrapolate their tastes in that direction once I’d been observing their purchases for a while, because they were genuinely good books I thought they’d like, and because they were both authors whom we stocked fairly extensively, so the readers could work up a good head of steam and get excited about their new author without needing to find another one too soon.

And it worked. Even if those same readers had pulled a Necroscope book off the shelf, looked at it, and put it back, once I talked to them and made the connection to what they already liked, they went back and picked it up. Nine times out of ten, they liked it, told me they liked it, and kept reading that author.

All of which was great, of course. It made my manager happy, because we were selling books. It made my regulars happy, because I was finding them new authors and keeping them fed with new books. And it made me happy, because, well, it was fun playing bookshelf alchemy, mixing and matching and generally coming up with gold.

I did realize, however, that what I was doing and what they were getting were two different things. What I was doing was extending their reading and purchasing habits through observation and extrapolation, relying on their trust of my taste and the fact that I “knew” them as readers. What they were getting was, in many cases, something that could only be called a benediction, someone else’s blessing to check out the book and a second opinion when they didn’t entirely trust their own.

Digression: While working in that bookstore, the other clerks and I observed what we jokingly called the Pattern of Picking Purchase

1. If the book was face-out and the cover was appealing, the reader might pick it up.
2. If they picked it up, they might scan the front cover for the title, the author, and any blurbs that might have made it to that side of the spine.
3. If they liked the cover, they might flip it over to read the back-of-book blurb.
4. If they liked the back-of-book blurb, then they might be interested enough to crack the book open and read a few pages.
5. And if they liked those few pages, they might then buy the book.

Five steps, each of which required time, each of which had attrition along the way. It was much easier, then, and more effective, to talk to the customer[2], get a sense of what they were after and provide, as needed, a summary and a recommendation. In other words, we jumped to the end, gave them the condensed version of what they were in many cases looking for.

On one level, it was a hard sell. On another, it was a genuine attempt to connect people with books they would enjoy. And on a third, it was a basic recognition of the fact that a lot of our customers simply didn’t know where to go next with their reading, and appreciated guidance from folks who were presumably experts.

There’s nothing new there, of course. After all, that’s why they put blurbs on the cover; it’s advice from experts. If you like what I write, it stands to reason that you’ll probably like what I blurb, or so goes the theory. Again, though, there’s something much more immediate and telling when the recommendation comes from a bookseller the reader knows. Book buyers tend to be regulars, and that means that they potentially form at least nodding acquaintances with the folks at the stores they frequent[3]. They trust those booksellers to know their tastes and to know what’s on their shelves, and to be able to put those two things together. Tap into that as a reader, and you have a reliable, personal source for good books. Tap into it as a bookseller, and you have happy repeat customers who keep coming around, because you rarely steer them wrong. And if you can tap into it as an author, you’re doing something very smart and potentially expanding your voice in a thousand different places where you can’t be.

Because if the booksellers know and like your work, they’re that much more likely to recommend it to their regular and valued customers. And from where the customers are sitting, if their trusted booksellers are recommending a book, it’s because it’s damn well worth the read.

So mock the lowly bookstore clerk at your peril, would-be authors near and far. For all the whiz-bangery at online booksellers’ disposal, it is still the individual bookseller – one who is not lowly at all – who has the direct and trusted line to the reader, one that has been slowly and carefully established in a million different cases. It is far better to go to as many stores as you can, to talk to the booksellers there as the respected professionals who will in fact be purveying your book to the public, and to get them interested in what you are doing.

After all, if they’re good at their jobs, they’re going to be asked by their loyalists, “What should I read next?” There’s no reason the answer can’t, or shouldn’t – when appropriate – be you.

Los Angeles is not my usual stomping ground, so visiting twice in a month is quite the event. One trip was for Book Expo America, while the current trip is tied into a recording session for a Game Which Shall Not Be Named. Both trips seem straightforward – go in, take care of business, go home.

But around the edges, you can always find stories. Here are six.

ONE

Never before have I been haunted by Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

I first saw her in the corridor between the West and South Halls of the Convention Center, a block-long carpeted slog liberally bespangled with posters, banners, and ads carefully attached to the very ground the attendees walked on. I was in discussion with my agent and he looked over my shoulder and said, “Look. Dr. Ruth.”

I turned around and looked. There she was, motoring down the hall at a goodly pace, her people hurrying to keep up with her. She looked much as she did during her basic cable heyday, instantly recognizable.

I had no idea she was going to be at BEA. I had no idea why she was at BEA, as the sort of book I’d assume Dr. Ruth to be involved with isn’t generally my cup of tea. That being said, I certainly have nothing against Dr. Ruth, and I watched her sweep by, impressed.

I did not stop her, or ask for an autograph.

Later that day, I ran into her again on the sidewalks of Figueroa Street. We nearly bumped into each other. I said, “Excuse me.” She said something that I think was “Of course,” and we went our separate ways.

I called my wife that night. “You’ll never guess who I saw,” I told her. “Dr. Ruth. Twice.”

“Huh,” my wife said. “What’s she doing at BEA?”

I thought about that for a minute. “I think she sells more books than I do.”

And that, I thought, was that. My brush with celebrity at the conference, my semi-six-degrees moment. I saw Dr. Ruth, and it would make for a good story.

That afternoon, there was a signing in the Wizards of the Coast booth for the first few authors on the new Discoveries imprint: Myself, Joe McDermott, Rob Rogers, and Steve and Melanie Tem. We sat ourselves down in our respective corners, readied our signing hands, and prepared for we knew not what. (Rob, Joe and myself, at least – Steve and Melanie were cool as cucumbers, and Steve’s Magical Signing Pen was a subject of widespread awe and wonder).  The doors opened, metaphorically speaking. The people swept in. We signed, we schmoozed, we joked, we occasionally surreptitiously rubbed our wrists when we thought no one was looking.

When suddenly, through the middle of the crowd, swept Dr. Ruth. The people parted for her. She had no entourage, did not yell, did not need to announce her presence. She simply was there, and the next second there was a space around her.

She marched up to where I sat, shook my hand, and then grabbed a copy of Firefly Rain off the pile. We spoke very briefly about what was in the book, and then she said, “I would like you to autograph this for my grandson. He is quite precocious.”

At least, that’s what I think she said. Most of my brain was locked down with the enormous task of Not Saying Something Incredibly Stupid, like “Hey, I was a big fan of yours when I was a teenager” or “You know, I tried one of the things I saw on your show and it didn’t work.”

You know. Stuff like that.

Instead, I concentrated on making my signature legible. On the other side of the desk, another author was trying to force a copy of her boon on Dr. Ruth, who ignored her magnificently, took the book from me, and vanished into the crowd

It took about thirty seconds for the booth to return to normal, if normal is the right word for it.

And I’d signed a book for Dr. Ruth.

TWO

The lure of BEA for the casual attendee is free books. Publishers will set down piles of freebies like the lost treasures of Croesus, encouraging passers-by to take them. Some of these books will be arranged artfully, in effigies that mimic the giant termite mounds of Africa or the spirit-touched menhirs of Glastonbury Tor. Others will be stacked neatly, for greater ease in plundering. Some were clutched in the arms of attractive women who generously handed them out, along with fulsome praise for the books they were sharing. Some were cast haphazardly, perhaps victims of drive-by freebee-ing.

I’d heard tales of the wondrous riches of BEA, of the ever-flowing springs of free reading material. I’d received books from friends who attended, handed off with the words “I saw this at the show and you might like it”, as if it was the easiest thing in the world just to abscond with books. In my heart, I lusted after the opportunity, the chance to wander among the aisles picking low-hanging literary fruit.

But when I got there, I discovered something: I’m not very good at taking free things.

After all, I didn’t know which books were there for the taking and which ones were there for display purposes only, and nightmare visions of taking the one book that wasn’t up for grabs haunted me. What if I took something that wasn’t supposed to be a freebie? Would I be summarily chased from the floor, stoned with remaindered paperbacks and banished into the lobby? Would I simply attract whispers as “the guy who took the wrong book?”

The fear was paralyzing. I put my hand out near a titanic pile of copies of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, then pulled it back. Reached out again, pulled it back again. Made eye contact with the woman minding the booth, who was busy adding copies to the monolith. And then stepped back, and let someone else reach in and snatch up a copy before finally daring to do it on my own.

“Thank you.” I said to the woman who was standing there. She looked surprised before answering with a “You’re welcome.” And I realized, in the time I’d been standing there watching and preparing to avail myself of freebies, no one had said thank you. They had just swooped in, made their grabs, and flitted on to the next score, the next pile, the next freebie.

Something about that struck me as sad. Why take a book you wouldn’t appreciate? Why not appreciate the fact that someone had taken a moment to put the book out for you?  If the name of the game was relentless acquisition, what separated BEA from, say, the endless thotchke-fest that was E3, or GenCon, or a baseball card convention.

I picked my books carefully from that point on, and said thank you when I could.

THREE

At times, it pays to be greedy.

I’d picked my selections carefully, but books are still books, and books are heavy. The key word in the wood pulp that makes up book paper is “wood”, meaning that that book you’re holding is in fact a soft pine brick between two glossy covers. Get a bunch of them, and you’ve got your triceps workout for the day.

But many of the BEA booths offer, in addition to free books, free totes for carrying books. The ones from Viz, a manga publisher, are particularly striking. After all, they’re purple.

I grabbed on the first day of the show. Saturday, when my book-nabbing confidence had grown, I filled it. With my hotel a few blocks from the convention center, I was faced with a choice: haul my loot back to drop it off, then start the cycle again, or simply nab another tote and fill that as well.

I decide to be dignified. I take my tote and head back to the hotel. I believe at one point on the walk back, I was whistling.

And then, around the corner from the hotel, I hit an uneven seam in the sidewalk and rolled my foot.

I stopped and tested it. It didn’t seem too bad. I shrugged, finished my trip back, and carefully unloaded my spoils. I tested my foot again, and it didn’t hurt much. I’d rolled my foot before, after all, and it rarely had done much to slow me down. Besides, it was BEA. When would I pass this way again?

So I headed back, empty tote in tow. In the first hour or so back on the floor, I refilled my tote. My foot was throbbing a little, so rather than shlep back, I nabbed another tote instead. I felt mildly silly with two, until nearly getting run over by someone with a bulging backpack and three.

A few more books went into the bag. I rearranged them. My foot really started hurting. The inescapable fact that under the pretty carpet, the show floor was concrete, was making itself known.

By this time, I was limping and horribly self-conscious. A half hour later, I couldn’t walk. In agony, I hopped down the long corridor to the side of the convention center where the shuttle buses waited. I heaved myself into a seat and clenched my teeth with every bump and pothole.

Eventually, the shuttle got to the hotel. I hopped off, literally. Hopped to my room. Gulped down a handful of Tylenol. Tried to figure out what to do next, with a bum pin and two totes full of books. Tried walking across the room, and literally could not do it. The painkillers in my travel kit seemed a long way off, the ice machine on the sixth floor impossibly far away. I experimented. Shoved my foot back into my shoe (sans sock – there was no room) and tried to hop.

Which is why, ten minutes later, I was propped up in bed with one foot shoved into a purple tote bag filled with ice, reading. The second bag was full of neatly stacked books, right next to the bed.

Sometimes, it pays to be greedy.

FOUR

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” the cabbie says. “I’m an LAX cab. This is Burbank cab territory.” But he lets in anyway, and takes us off to Hollywood Boulevard for a friend’s birthday party. We pass Nickelodeon, we pass Vivid, we pass Warner Brothers and marvel that the infamous water tower of Animaniacs fame is real. It’s a long drive.

Eventually, we talk, as fares and cabbies do. He asks us what we’re doing here, and Mike (Lee, author of seven novels for Black Library) and I tell him we write video games. He tells us he’d had another fare who did that, and who’d encouraged him to get into the business.

“You write?” I ask.

He writes. Back home on the East Coast, he’d been a playwright. He’d had his work produced in Philadelphia and New York, among other places.

In LA, he drives a cab.

“Good luck with the writing,” he said. “And I can drop you off a block from the club, in case you don’t want to be seen pulling up in a taxi. Lots of people don’t want to be seen pulling up in a taxi. They may live in a shack, but if they’re going out, they’ve got to show up in a limo.”

Mike and I look at each other. “We’ve got no problem with a taxi,” I say. “We’re writers.”

FIVE

There is no mercy in the recording studio. The lines get laid out there, naked. They’re interpreted by a director who doesn’t know what was in your head, read by an actor who hasn’t heard the way you heard them in your head when you wrote them.

They’re naked, and defenseless. Weakness is exposed mercilessly. Bad word choice, run-on, awkward word sequence, too many sibilants in a row – they’re all held up for review. They crash on the ear. The actor stumbles and stutters. The words just sound wrong.

With luck, there aren’t too many. With luck, the director is good and you’ll have the chance to fix them, to suggest an alternate take or a rewrite. With experience, you train your ear to know instinctively where the lines could go wrong, to head them off before the actor ever sees them.

But you never catch them all, and there will always be that moment when your words are inescapably bad, inescapably wrong.

You leave your ego at the studio door. Really, you have no choice.

SIX

Back to BEA.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the show. It’s as big as E3 used to be, forty thousand book people pushing books, signing books, taking books, advertising books, showing off books, making deals for books, you name it. Books are very much a commodity there, and a lone writer wandering the hallowed halls for the first time feels very much a tiny cog inside a titanic machine.

And then, Saturday. I swung by the WotC booth to check in, and as I talked to one of the folks there, a woman rushed in. Right past me she went, and up to the estimable Jessica Blair, with a question:

“Does Richard Dansky have anything else out? I really loved Firefly Rain.”

Jessica kept a straight face, looked at me, and said, “Why don’t you ask him?”

The woman looked at Jessica. Looked at me and tried to reconcile the guy she saw with the bearded, slightly dyspeptic guy in the dust jacket photo. Looked back at Jessica. Looked back at me.

And got the biggest damn smile on her face.

There are lots of terrible things you can do with books, should you be so inclined.

You can maltreat them. Spill coffee on them, bend the spines back, read ‘em in the bathtub and drop ‘em in the lavender-scented suds. Then you can try to fob them off on the local used bookstore, claiming they’re perfectly readable, and get all shirty when the clerk points out that the spine has a waveform like radio emissions off the poles of Jupiter.

You can burn them. This is a long-time favorite of various flavors of fascistic and theocratic ignoramuses, though it must be noted that while burning books may give you more shelf space, it also adds to your carbon footprint, and that’s bad. All that soot goes somewhere, you know.

(True story: Whilst I was employed at a publisher who shall not be named, we supposedly got a phone call from a group looking to stock up in anticipation of a book burning. And, since our material was so obviously satanic, they thought they’d give us a call to see if they could get the kindling wholesale, instead of retail. We cleared more slow-moving material out of the warehouse that day than…but I digress.)

You can ignore them, stack them up unread and leave them in a corner. Let the dust gather and the spines warp under the weight of all of the other “gonna get to” titles you’ve got lined up, lose them and leave them unread, only to be discovered when it’s moving time and there’s only so much box space for books to go around.

Worst of all, though, is what I do. I review them.

***

Why do book reviews? After all, I could be writing my own stuff, instead of commenting on someone else’s. And why on earth would I, a writer trying to establish myself, run the risk of horking off the people whose books I review? I’ve asked them myself a time or two, but I find that there are good reasons for me to take up my pen in the service of reviewing, and to devote words that might otherwise have gone elsewhere to the noble craft of saying “Hey, that one’s pretty good.”

Let’s start with the practical reasons for me to write reviews, not the least of which is that I spend a lot of time on planes and in hotel rooms. If I’m going to have that time, I’d rather spend it reading than playing my DS, hearing my fellow passengers discuss their symptoms of gastro-intestinal distress, or watching the endless episodes of “Two and a Half Men” that seem to have replaced the in-flight movie as airborne entertainment of choice. Furthermore, since airplane seats are not designed for anyone who isn’t shaped like Bernini’s Aeneas to work on their laptops in-flight, writing on a plane is right out for me.

I might as well read, then. And if I’m going to read, I might as well take advantage of the opportunity to try something different, material I wouldn’t necessarily have picked out on my own but which my editor feels I can comment on cogently. In other words, when that reviewing packet comes in from the fine folks at Green Man Review, I generally have absolutely no idea what the hell is in there, and look forward to the discovery with horribly jejeune child-at-Christmas glee. After all, there’s new books in that there box, just waiting for me. Whee!

As a result, my reviewing then becomes a way to discover new authors. Susan Palwick’s short story collection, The Fate of Mice, gobsmacked me as I sat in an uncomfortable airport chair, waiting to board an endlessly delayed puddlejumper. I confess now that I never would have picked it up on my own. Howard Waldrop had always been in my “I need to read him someday” pile until Things Will Never Be the Same dropped in my lap. Now I’m a stone fan. John Gordon. Storytellers’ own Elizabeth Bear. The list goes on. For that alone I’d say I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth out of reviewing.

Then, beyond that, is the challenge. As far as I’m concerned, there are two things a book review should do, two questions that it should answer for the reader.

1) Is the book worth a reader’s time and/or money?

2) If so, why? If not, why not[1]?

The first seems straightforward, and it can be. Is the book good? Is it worth reading? It’s not quite a yes-or-no system, but it’s close. And if that’s all a review does, providing a good, honest, and consistent answer to that question, then it’s done enough of its job to be considered a keeper. After all, that’s why most folks read reviews – to get advice on whether something’s worth their attention. A definitive “no” from a reviewer you trust is more than a short read; it’s a rescue from the waste of time, money, and good humor that comes from being trapped on an airplane with only the adventures of Glognorf the Axe-Hewer amidst the Lizard-Kings of Sknarf to read (which you picked up because the cover art looked intriguing in the airport bookshop and you didn’t know any better, doncha know).

If you find a reader whom you can map your tastes against with reasonable accuracy, that’s valuable. Even if it’s not someone you agree with, that works – if the matters of disagreement are consistent, then you’ve got a working referral metric in place that ought to do you just fine. A reviewer who hates everything you like and likes everything you hate is 100% accurate. You just have to learn how to read them, and once you do, you’re set.

The second question, though, is the more interesting one for me, and the part that makes reviews interesting for me to write. I can generally figure out my gut reaction to a book fairly quickly, but understanding why I have that reaction is what requires thinking. Doping that out and then trying to distill that understanding for the reader then becomes the challenge that makes the whole thing interesting, and useful to the reader.

It’s not enough for me to say that I liked the graphic novel 21 Down but had some reservations. Laying out what those reservations were gives the reader a better look at both the content and the approach of the material, and lets them make a more educated decision. It also lets them decide whether my objections are ones they might share, and therefore whether they should heed or ignore what I’m pointing out. As for me, I get the challenge of framing those concerns while making them readable, instead of just listing off a Recitation of the Kvetch. If I don’t figure out why I liked or disliked something, then I feel I’ve failed as a reader, and I haven’t taken everything away from the book that I could. If I do dope it out, however, and can express it, then I’ve taken more away than I might have if I were just reading for myself.

It is, dare I say it, fun writing to do. So long as there’s something in the reviewed material to think about – good or bad – then digging deeper and presenting that unearthed material to the reader can be a lot of fun to do.

Buried in all of that is the other reason for me to do reviews, one that relates to my own writing. As noted above, reviewing gives me the chance to read a great many different authors. Doing good[2] reviews forces me to read closely, and to analyze what all of those diverse authors are doing. In other words, it’s a crash course in modern fiction, one where there’s no final exam but my own work and the syllabus is ever-changing. Not everything I’ve reviewed, I’ve enjoyed. Not everything has offered something more than a pleasant read (or an unpleasant one). The sum and total, however, has been a mandatory thinking about writing, complete with often superb examples, and curriculum that always provides something new.

Occasionally, I’m even paying attention.

---

[1] And don’t even think about emailing me with “that’s three questions”. It’s a Boolean condition. You get one or the other. Two total. So nyah.

[2] At least, I hope they’re good.

Recently, someone used the user review function over at amazon.com to pan my novel Firefly Rain. The book’s crime? Incorrect use of the word “y’all”. Apparently the way I’d trawled my y’alls did not jibe with the reader’s understanding of how y’all is supposed to be used, and as such, he had no use for the rest of the book as well. He gave the book two stars and made impolite noises on the way out, and that was that.

Now, there are a couple of ways to respond to something like this. The easy way would have been to puff up my chest, print out copies of all of the nice user reviews, and fan myself with them vigorously while declaiming to all and sundry that the uncomplimentary reviewer has no bleepin’ idea what he’s talking about.

But this, as they say, would be wrong. The guy read the book and he didn’t like it. He’s entitled. He’s also entitled to share his opinion, whether I agree with it or not, and at least he cared enough to post something. So, there’s nothing to see here.

There are other options. I could dig up proof that the reviewer was in fact incorrect. I could post evidence demonstrating that I had in fact used “y’all” correctly, as defined by some arbitrary authority or other, buttress my argument with anecdotal evidence, and attempted to wage war over Amazon stars on the rarefied plains of pure logic and citation.

This would also be the wrong thing to do. Once that debate starts, it never ends, and it sucks down time like a fourteen year old chugs down Mountain Dew. Reference, counter-reference, my cousin’s from Mississippi, well I know a guy from Tennessee, and away it goes and goes. There’s no closure there, no benefit and no reason to pursue it. Those who disagree most likely won’t be convinced by anything I can show, and I’m certainly not in a position go back and retroactively adjust apostrophes. There’s no win there.

Or, I could ignore it. I could look at the other, positive reviews, tell myself it’s an aberration, and go on with my literary life as before.

All together now: this would be another mistake.

Why? Not because I particularly agree with the comment. If I did, I wouldn’t have written the book the way I did. In all honesty, I’ve been living in the South (or at least in areas surrounded by the South) for nigh unto thirteen years now, and from what I’ve seen the debate over the appropriate use of “y’all” – Is it singular? One of a group? Singular and plural? Singular, with “all y’all” used for the plural? – is about as heated and unlikely to get resolved as the argument over what would have happened if Stonewall Jackson hadn’t gotten himself shot at Chancellorsville. Right way, wrong way – it depends on whom you talk to. But even that is a diversion; the argument itself is a null issue. The correct usage isn’t what’s important here.

What matters is that a reader felt I got something wrong, and by their lights, I did. From where that reader is sitting, I made a sloppy, inexcusable mistake, one that was bad enough to imply that I had done none of my research and thus nothing I wrote would be valid. By his lights, I used “y’all” wrong, and that was enough to discredit the rest of his reading experience.

That’s it. End of story. Like I said, for purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter whether I was right, wrong, or just another goddamned carpetbagging Yankee looking to take advantage of the South to pocket a shiny nickel or two. We’re talking about something else here, something a lot bigger than me or thee or, dare I say it, y’all.

The important thing is that I butted up against a reader’s understanding, their perception of the way things actually are. And once you go up against what a reader knows to be true, you can’t win. Either you agree, or you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong there goes any willingness that reader might have to buy into what you’re putting on the page.

Digression – This is not unique to fiction writing. In fact, it’s something I run into in my video game work all the time. Everyone knows, for example, that tanks move very slowly. This is because they are large and made of metal, and in the World War II movies that formed a lot of popular opinion about matters military, tanks did the armored division equivalent of running like a catcher. So, the conventional wisdom is that Tanks Are Slow, and God save anyone who puts a fast tank in their game from the savaging they’ll get from critics and fans. Never mind that your average US main battle tank can cruise at around 45 MPH; everyone knows tanks are slow, and not delivering on that expectation is just asking for trouble. The expectation trumps the reality, and having that expectation violated – even by honest-to-Murgatroyd truth – detracts from the player’s experience. They’re getting cognitive dissonance instead of immersion because of that one detail that they know is wrong, and that hits the player’s enjoyment like a sock full of pennies to the back of the neck.

It works on the other side, too, incidentally. I once had a collaborator on a fantasy-themed project tell me that “dwarves aren’t really like that!” when I tried to make them something other than axe-wielding ZZ Top impersonators with comedy Scottish accents. The image of the “truth” of this pop-culture mythical race was so strong to him that he couldn’t see them any other way, even when given carte blanche to do so. Think about it.

All joking aside, though, I don’t mean to denigrate either the importance of reader perception or the depth of the issue. It matters what the audience thinks, and every time a creator gives them something other than what they were expecting, that creator is walking a tightrope between reader surprise and reader rejection. It bears repeating; if the reader has to adjudicate between what they read and what they know, then they are shunted outside of the narrative and become aware that they are in the act of reading a book. And if they’re aware that they’re reading, they’re not immersed in the story, and suddenly, the magic goes poof in a cloud of fractured pixie wings.

What to do, then, what to do? It is impossible to know what every single potential reader thinks, and catering to all of those no doubt contradictory reader assumptions is purely impossible. On the other hand, it does make a certain amount of sense to stick a finger in the figurative wind and figure out what the audience’s preconceptions on your subject matter are likely to be. It makes more sense not to deliberately contravene those assumptions without good reason, and to acknowledge that you are in fact making a different choice. This can be as simple as having a character say “I thought all tanks were slow” and allowing an expert character to refute the point, but however you do it, you’re letting the reader know you’re aware of their potential issue and challenging them to change their views, instead of leaving them to disagree in solitude and grumbly silence.

Which takes me back, I suppose, to where all of this started. What comes out of all of this is a reminder to remember that the audience’s understanding of the world and mine are not precisely congruent, that the things I take for granted in my writing may be strange and jarring and incorrect to a reader. I’m not happy to get a bad review, of course, but I do appreciate the reminder. It’s a good one, and important, and appreciated.

Y’all know what I mean? I thought so.

Memory hits in the damndest places.

Halfway across the Atlantic, for example. It’s the day after a business trip to Paris, and I’m bone-weary. The flight is full; no empty seats for stretching out this time, and the woman in front of me had reclined her seat into my lap even before takeoff. A coworker’s got the seat next to mine, intent on her portable DVD player and hoping vaguely that nobody’s seated a kid where they can see the gory vampire shenanigans unfolding onscreen. The in-flight movie’s a non-starter, not with the back-of-seat screen shoved down roughly to the level of the oddly shaped pizza that passes for an in-flight meal.

So I doze. A baseball podcast I’ve heard five or six times before loops on my headphones, lulling me to sleep with promises of slugging third basemen who’ve reported to camp in the best shape of their life. Outside, it’s a grey airplane wing keeping me from seeing grey clouds over grey water. I close my eyes and try to sleep, wearily aware that the 5AM wakeup call I’d set for myself was midnight back home, that the trip had been too short for anything but wallowing in jet lag, and that I normally don’t go to bed until two hours, body clock time, after the damnable French alarm clock had gotten me up.

(A note to the curious traveler: French hotel rooms almost never feature clocks, alarm or otherwise. They have television sets with clocks and alarms built into their bases, and said television is generally plugged into the one available wall socket near whatever passes for a desk and thus serves as an appropriate spot for a laptop. If you’re going to use your laptop, you must first unplug the television/clock/alarm. This leads to untold quiet panic when you finish, plug the TV back in, and attempt to reset the clock manually so as to avoid the possibility of setting it wrongly, oversleeping, missing your plane, and being stranded in France without  any clean socks as a result. This somehow never ends up being a problem, however, as the sheer worry over the possibility of a possibly incorrect clock translates nicely to a night full of panic-stricken awakenings every fifteen minutes until the sun comes up. But I digress.)

And so I doze, and I remember a night, fifteen years gone. It’s nothing special, I’m afraid, just a memory of driving around a part of Boston called Allston on a rainy fall night, trying to find a parking space near a friend’s house.

Then I wake up, and I think about what had just crawled out of my subconscious. There was no particular reason for this memory to emerge, nothing on the trip that would invoke it. There was nothing coming up that would summon it, either – no trips to Boston, no visits to the friend’s house I was seeking in memory. Hell, it wasn’t even the right time of year.

So I thought about it for a while, and eventually dozed back off, right back into that same memory. Back into the bare black tree trunks along the narrow streets, slick with rain as water dripped off the branches. Back into the long straight drive along the cemetery wall that marked the edge of the neighborhood, with the distant sound of the Commonwealth Avenue traffic whispering on through. Back to shining, cold streets twisting and turning past too-tall, too-thin houses squeezed in against one another like an overcrowded bookshelf. Back to a moment and a time long gone, one that hadn’t seemed particularly significant when it happened.

At that point I shook myself awake again at that point, a bit confused, a bit restive. There was a bit of brow-furrowing as I tried to figure out why this particular memory had chosen this particular moment. Nothing about it stood out; I seemed to recall that at the time, I was mostly more irritated than anything else over the complete and utter lack of parking to be had. I was late, or at least I remembered being late, and being irritated with myself for precisely that reason. And being late, and being on the hunt for parking, I spent those moments staring at the serried rows of cars that wrapped up both sides of those Allston streets. I didn’t look at those trees. I didn’t look at that cemetery wall.

Or at least, I didn’t think I did. Yet here they were, vivid in memory, in imagination.

I stayed up for a while, played for a little while on my Nintendo DS, read a bit of one of the books I’d brought with me. Put on my iPod, too, with fancy noise-reduction headphones and a whole lot of writing music on the hard drive. All of that bought me an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and then I was out again, back in Allston, a passenger in memory.

Truth be told, I was no closer to figuring out why that memory had emerged. As I write this, I must confess, I still don’t know. What I do know is that all of a sudden, for whatever reason, that memory was there for the taking. White streetlamps reflected off the road, purple clouds scudding overhead, sidewalks humping up at odd angles because of over-aggressive tree roots – all of them were available. I didn’t remember seeing any of this at the time, but clearly I did, clearly I had, because now it was all there for the taking. Yes, the memory of annoyance lingered, along with hints of panic and urgency and oh-Jesus-I’m-late-again-and-they’re-gonna-kill-me. But that’s not what matters now. What I see, what I remember are those black branches, twisted in the thin bits of moonlight. It’s the solitary man walking his dog, seeing me cruise by and turning away. It’s the hiss of tape in the cassette deck and water under the tires,  the creak of worn-out windshield wipers and the thunk of a suspension that was never made for Boston potholes.

And all of that is now available, waiting to be summoned up again. It’s a memory I didn’t know I had, of things I didn’t realize I’d seen. But they were there, surely enough, real enough to be picked up out of the corner of my eye and kept against the day when they were needed, or wanted, or perhaps just worth taking a look at once again. I’m sure I’ll find a use for those trees sooner or later. Maybe not in the book I’m working on now, maybe not for a while, but they’re in the inventory, there to be called upon when I need them. The same goes for the sounds of that night, and for the wet stone wall with its locked cemetery gates and array of empty beer bottles standing sentinel up top, and for every other bit of that evening that’s told me it was important enough to stay with me, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’m sure there are other memories like that, waiting for their moment to emerge, using their own inscrutable logic to decide when they’re needed. I’ll welcome them, and look forward to revisiting what they have to show me. I’ll look forward to seeing what they can give me for the next story, or the one after, the found gems of memory that I didn’t know I needed at the time. The readers need never know where those pinched, angular houses came from, or how that cemetery gate was just a flash in a rearview. They don’t need to know, and they never will. It’s enough that I do, and that for whatever reason, at whatever time, I remembered where to look for them.